John Updike

As Contributor

John Updike

John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Harvard in 1954 with a degree in English, he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. Although he only worked there for two years, the publication would publish him frequently throughout his life. Updike wrote four novels featuring a protagonist named Rabbit Angstrom, a man who was emblematic of middle-class America. Later, Updike’s novels explored the decline of social mores, including infidelity and adultery. Over his lifetime, Updike published dozens of novels and short stories, poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children’s books. He is one of only three authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction multiple times.

An icon of literature as American Pop Art, Frederic Tuten’s Adventures of Mao on the Long March is a triumphantly witty and subversive novel. The New York Times called it “almost too good to be true.” Tuten’s deadpan textbook narrative of Mao’s Long March is peppered with loving parodies of Hemingway, Kerouac, Dos Passos, and Malamud. As John Updike comments, the book includes “twenty-seven pages of straight history of the Long March (October 1934-October 1935), done in a neutral, factual tone, as by a fellow-traveling Readers Digest…thirty-six and a half pages of quotations in quotation marks…and twenty-six pages of what might be considered normal novelistic substance—imaginary encounters and conversation.…

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”